Imagine the National inviting RuPaul to play Hamlet. Or Tate giving Beryl Cook a retrospective. The London Sinfonietta offered a similar cocktail of mischief and insanity in devoting the opening concert of its return to the Queen Elizabeth Hall, after a three-year refurbishment, to the nihilistic drag act David Hoyle. It had me grinning from ear to ear. Mostly from watching the other critics squirm. The woman next to me, an off-duty member of the Sinfonietta, was spitting words into her hand: ‘Patronising bollocks’.
It was one of those nights. Half the audience stony-faced and tensed with anger. The other half creased double and whooping. It’s what you get if you transfer the trashy camp of a gay mecca like the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, Hoyle’s usual home, to this sexless temple of high modernism.
The Gender Agenda was a new work by the composer Philip Venables, a game show with a gobby host (Hoyle) instead of a soloist, catchphrases standing in for pitch material. ‘Let’s destroy the military-industrial complex!’ he enjoined us, in the way Brucey used to announce the presence of a cuddly toy. The Sinfonietta, squished to the back of the stage, were consigned to squirting out gobbets of rancid Gebrauchsmusik. Then a sudden burst of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. This set off an alarm warning us on a big screen that we were exposing ourselves to ‘Homosexual Music’.
It was hard not to agree with my neighbour’s analysis during the game itself, in which audience members were dragged up on stage to draw and then guess various sexist scenarios. Too didactic. Too much preaching to the converted.
But the value of this work was not in the detail but in the kamikaze boldness of the whole.
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